Teaching Prepositions through Clay

Once again, I am honoured to have Jennifer Kofin as a guest blogger on my site.  She is an ESL teacher at my school, and a damn good one at that!

Here is her engaging lesson:

Teaching Prepositions through the use of Clay

Last week I had to prepare a lesson on location prepositions for my ESL students. Knowing that teaching this particular topic could be quite boring, I searched for ways to make it more engaging.

I found a story that covered the prepositions that we were learning in class. I had the students read the story and then had them highlight all of the location prepositions that they could find. Students were then given clay and asked to sculpt the examples of prepositions from the story. Students took this task and thrived on it!

Every student had to represent the same prepositions, but there were no limits on how the students had to design their objects. Each student had a different interpretation of what to create. Students found meaning in the task and effectively learned how and when to use these prepositions.

Below are the prepositions that were used in the story:

• Above
• Below
• Under
• Over
• On
• In front of
• Beside
• Behind

Students were then asked to write a story using these prepositions. Once students understood the prepositions they were good to go! Each story was unique and used the prepositions properly. Their learning was extended because they had to create meaning from the stories that they wrote. Students were actually excited to write and did a great job!  Here is one of clay pictures:

Personally, I gave Jennifer a high five!  I am pleased to see another example where not every student needed to get the same answer to be correct!  True demonstration of creativity in the classroom.  GO JEN GO!

Engaging activity at my school

Today I am honoured to have Jennifer Kofin as a guest blogger.  She is a second year teacher, who teaches ESL, at my school.  After trying to get away from the traditional fill-in-the-blanks worksheets, she has created an amazing and engaging activity.  The students were not marked or graded, however still assessed and in a non-traditional way.  Here is her story:

One of the topics that we were covering in ESL one day was prepositions. I went over the various prepositions that I wanted the students to learn giving them specific examples. I wanted them to practice using these prepositions through sentences but wanted to avoid the typical worksheet format. So one of my esteemed colleagues suggested that I use the Smart board and two interactive dice. On one die I put the preposition and on the other I had the students brainstorm different verbs that we could use. Students were then given the opportunity to come up to the Smart board and hit each of the dies and create a sentence. This task was done verbally and the students did really well! My students really enjoyed this activity and I was able to assess their understanding of the prepositions and verbs without using pen and paper.